“What’s your favorite method to build links to your site?”
Through competitor analysis and then building similar content is a great way to go. Working out what’s performed well and finding a market gap to leverage.
“SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize and rank your web content.”
For any business, advertising is of utmost need. When any business goes online, the advertising works best to garner a huge amount of web traffic. SEO gives an opportunity for a great deal of free advertising. This makes the job of an SEO Executive extremely challenging and important.
Our interview today is with an expert SEO Executive – Meet Sally Newman.
Sally is an innovative digital marketer currently with Koozai. Once she sets her mind to a task you can be sure that she’ll find a minimum of 10 ways to make it even better than when she started. One of Sally’s greatest attributes it that she sees the whole process through to completion, dipping in at each stage to ensure success.
Sharing some of her SEO tips, it’s truly an honor to host Sally Newman in our Agency expert interview series:
1. How did you get into Account Management in the first place, and how did you get to where you are now ?
I’ve always been interested in marketing and I got into Account Management through my SEO Executive role at Koozai. I’ve always focused on customer services within my hospitality roles when I was younger but my role now is my first Account Management role and I’ve had this for almost 2 years.
I love client contact, whether that’s face to face or over the phone. I love building a rapport with people and getting to know different personalities.
2. We would like to know a bit about your career background, and how you got into SEO?
I studied Advertising at Southampton Solent University and before I finished my degree I landed myself a graduate marketing job within the university’s Conference Centre. Whilst I enjoyed it, it didn’t push me enough and was quite generalised. I also felt a bit like a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. In my degree, I’d done some digital modules that I loved so I read up, did some hunting around and discovered Koozai. I’d done some digital at my old job and knew I wanted to delve into this further. I moved to Koozai in early 2015, so I’ve nearly been here two years now. This is where my journey with SEO started and I couldn’t be happier. In this industry and more importantly, than at Koozai.
3. What do you believe to be the most important task you do on a daily basis? Why?
The fundamentals. No matter what you’re doing, you can’t miss the essentials, like an On-Page Checklist otherwise your entire strategy will fold. Address the basics and build out from there.
4. What resources or influencers do you follow for staying ahead in the world of SEO?
So many! We have KoozAcademy training sessions with the best thought leaders in the industry so I’ve been able to build connections through that. BrightonSEO is a great way to make connections and meet new people in the industry.
In terms of resources, I keep up with a broad range such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, PPC Hero, some tech sites like Verve, advertising sites such as Adweek and so many more like UX Magazine, TechCrunch, Simo Ahava’s blog and more. I also read a number of business books about women in business. Discovering how they got into business, and their passions is something I find interesting.
5. What do you think is your greatest career accomplishment?
I’d say training new team members and moulding them to be awesome SEOs. I’ve also started helping out students at my old school and university where I’ve helped them with their CV’s, delivered mock interviews and spoken in lectures and at careers evenings to inspire them to get into digital.
6. How do you think Search Engine Optimization will evolve in the coming years?
I think voice search will change a lot for SEO. I think other search engines like Bing might become more prominent and Google will continue to make it difficult for organic search to compete with Paid ads.
7. What’s your favorite method to build links to your site?
Through competitor analysis and then building similar content is a great way to go. Working out what’s performed well and finding a market gap to leverage.
8. Share with us your biggest SEO achievement and how you did it. For what competitive keywords have you ranked high and what techniques you used?
One of my highlights is completely turning a client’s search visibility round through a Local strategy. Whilst traffic increased by 20% year on year, their desktop rankings improved from their average position of 29 to 2 across 17 of their main search terms. Mobile rankings also boosted their average placement of 70 to 5 for 17 of their core terms. Some of the things I did to achieve this included building strong authority profiles, completely overhauling their entire local content strategy and increasing trust signals and authority for the overall site.
9. What do you think is the biggest SEO myth ?
‘The client is always right’ – not in the customer service sense but more to keep clients on track and focussed on the overall strategy and benefits to the account.
‘Link building is dead’. It isn’t and it won’t be. Link building takes so many forms so this couldn’t ever be the case.
10. What is the best SEO tip you give for your clients and our audience ?
This massively depends on the client’s specific needs but I’d say that there a few things that can go amiss but with them, you aren’t wasting precious time:
- Split the traffic by device and see if there’s a huge difference between desktop and mobile. If there is, focus on that area before the other.
- Mark everything up with Schema.
- Don’t forget about internal links and site architecture. Look at the best performing pages and maximise those efforts across your site.
Today we got to know some interesting SEO tips that could help businesses maximize their profits. Going forward there are many more specialists that we want to chat with. We will resume our discussion with another expert next week.
Until then, Happy Marketing!!
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